I am biologist. I read my thesis in 2007 and now I am working at the EMBL in Germany. I will be here until September (end of my contract) and then I will probably go straight to hell, because I do not know exactly what to do with my life . But, hey, they gave me my O2 for free!

I work at a startup (my third in a row now) - technically, I'm an "engineer," but since there aren't many of us I wear all hats: code in Ruby/Java/Scala, debugging C and C++, occasional sysad, product development, input on UI decisions, and so on. It's definitely a blast and I love being able to shape the product I'm writing, plus I work with an awesome team.

I used to do sysad and IT security consulting on a freelance/short-contract basis - that was fun but I'm sure glad I'm doing more now. Sys-ad especially got incredibly old incredibly fast.

I work as a manager at an oil company. Lots of looking at contracts and spreadsheets, or finding solutions to sometimes large and quite open-ended business problems. I am also responsible for all international banking transactions. I wrote much of the code used to interface with the wire transfer platforms we use (SWIFT formats etc), but I don't really have the time for development anymore. In the past I've mainly worked in teaching, and software development combined with some sysadmin.

Don't be so afraid C-E... During my thesis I didn't know what I wanted to do in my real life either. I learned physics and finally work as PM in a pharmaceutical company. Nothing related. During your thesis, you learn how to manage a scientific project and to think globally. That's already a good starting point. You'll learn your specific job on the go.

Instead I'm the lone IT guy for a family owned (not mine) printing company that was founded in 1896. I've been there for twelve years now. I have 15 servers and 60+ workstations running the usual array of Microsoft products, in addition to several iMacs and Mac Pro towers running Adobe and ESKO products. On top of all that I handle the Crystal Report writing, phone system, alarm system, wiring/cabling, 'help desk' stuff, broken home computers that magically appear in my office, etc... All the way down to changing toner. Some days I'm twiddling my thumbs thinking it's too damn quiet, other days I don't realize what time it is until my wife calls asking when I'm coming home.

Jack of all trades at a small specialized laser and electron beam welding company.

I do everything from IT to designing, building and programming custom control systems. My latest project was an automatic fixture for a helium mass spectrometer leak detector. I also do allot of repair work as some of our machines are decades old with all sorts of upgrades tacked on.

fu wrote:@87porsche, all of the printing houses i'm aware of run on macs for reasons of colour consistency, is windows ok for such a job? (not joking, genuine puzzlement)

Workflow modifications aside, we could easily get away with running Windows instead of Macs in our art department. It's just a matter of prying the $70 mice and keyboards out of their cold dead hands. It is of course the platform they've been accustomed to all these years.

For us though, the maintaining of color consistency occurs between the press and the customer's proof/existing printing. Then being able to reproduce that consistency time and time again in future jobs.

We do calibrate the iMacs and cinema displays (to the best of their abilities) to match what the presses can produce, but they'll never be 100% dead on with each other. So on the computer side of things, the emphasis is on the CMYK/RGB numbers... Which you can do on whatever platform you want.